In general, the activity of scrapbooking involves the selection and arrangement of various design elements to form a completed layout on a scrapbook page. These design elements may include ornate embellishments, stickers, pins, tabs, or other indicia comprising various designs. In addition, customized design elements may also be handmade by the author of the scrapbook pages from various types of scrapbooking paper and other materials, such as fabric or the like.
As scrapbooking has become increasingly popular, new trends in scrapbook page layouts have evolved. For example, one trend is to utilize two or more adjacent scrapbook pages to present an enlarged layout, whereby the pages share one or more common design elements that continue across the boundary between adjacent pages. While individual pages of the finished scrapbook product are bound or tethered to each other, such as by using straps or belts, the individual pages are loose or unbound during construction of the scrapbook. As a result, the author of a scrapbook constructing an enlarged layout across two pages must carefully position and maintain the positioning of the two unbound pages during construction of the enlarged layout. In other words, while constructing the side-by-side pages, the unbound pages are desirably kept in adjacent alignment with each other so that design elements can be arranged on the respective pages in a manner that when ultimately bound, the arrangement of the design elements spanning the two pages will be aligned and aesthetically pleasing.
The ability to maintain the pages in alignment during the construction process is, however, not a trivial task. To begin with, the scrapbook pages slide on most work surfaces and therefore as the various design elements are placed, reoriented, or removed from the pages, pages placed in side-by-side alignment are often moved, thereby requiring realignment. While this problem is often alleviated by the author holding the pages in place during movement of the design elements, this complicates construction of the pages since this restricts the author from maximizing the free movement of both hands.
Furthermore, the difficulty may be aggravated by the positioning of the mounting or retention receivers used to retain the scrapbook pages in the scrapbook album. That is, these receivers may not be consistently positioned from page to page due to variances in the manufacturing process used to produce the scrapbook pages. As such, the vertical positioning of the retention receivers that extend from the spine of the scrapbook pages may differ from page to page.
Thus, when the top and bottom edges of the pages are used to align adjacent pages during construction of the pages, the alignment of the design elements may not carry through to the finished (i.e. bound) scrapbook. In other words, when the scrapbook pages are inserted into an album, any design elements shared by the adjacent pages that extend or are applied across the adjacent pages will be vertically misaligned even though the author took care to align the pages by using the top and bottom edges during the construction of the pages.
Therefore, there is a need to overcome these and other problems encountered during construction of scrapbooks, especially the enlarged, side-by-side pages of scrapbooks.